San Diego-based Verenium (Nasdaq: [[ticker:VRNM]]), created in 2007 with the merger of Cambridge, MA-based Celunol and San Diego-based Diversa, had all the makings of a country-western song.
Diversa was a rambler, and gathered enzymes from the farthest corners of the world. Celunol was an Ivy League moonshiner. They got married—changed their name to Verenium—but times was hard and the marriage didn’t take. The part that was Celunol ran off with BP to make ethanol in Florida. (That didn’t take neither.) Carrying a woeful debt, Verenium came home to San Diego to start anew. Sold off some heirlooms from its enzyme library to pay down the debt. Last week, little Verenium said it had agreed to a buyout offer from Germany’s BASF, the largest chemical company in the world.
Know any words that rhyme with BASF?
There’s even a bit of discord in the harmony. At least eight law firms have announced that they are investigating the deal on behalf of shareholders, presumably to argue that Verenium’s board failed to get a better deal.
BASF offered $4 a share, which works out to more than $51 million based on nearly 12.8 million current Verenium shares outstanding—a total for the deal that was carried in numerous press reports over the weekend. In its statement, however, BASF said the total transaction amounted to roughly $62 million including debt.
Asked to clarify, BASF spokesman John Schmidt wrote
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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